Jlawrence’s Comments (group member since Mar 08, 2010)

Jlawrence’s comments from the The Sword and Laser group.

Yes! I can definitely join in next week.

What you all don't know is that GRRM regularly hires a rank clutch of sellswords from the Golden Company to harass Tom and Veronica into always covering GRRM news.

The VCR tapes in the book's 2009 were very distracting to me, especially given that digital video must have been entering the mainstream at the time the book was written. The transparent skin mutilation I thought was interesting - I could buy that as a possible genetic engineering/implant fashion possibility. But that someone's future self during the flashforward viewed a tv ad for genetically engineered 'designer babies' with boredom suggested a greater cultural shift toward total acceptance of *wholesale* human genetic engineering than I would expect in that short of time.

The hovercars weren't described in enough detail, in the parts I've read so far, for me to decide if they're unrealistic or not.

I liked the tidying-up bots crawling around future Gaston's walls and ceilings. I need some of those.

I definitely want to try it out, if my current PC hardware will permit it.

Dangit, I've wanted to read this for awhile. I'll try to finish up my current reads so I can join y'all.

Third of the way through Flashforward, and also reading Secret Ascension: Or Philip K. Dick Is Dead, Alas (can't tell yet if it will rise to brilliant PKD homage or continue to just feel like an interesting knockoff) and Programming in Objective-C (hey, if I'm gonna slog through it, I'm gonna get some Goodreads credit for it, durnit).

aldenoneil, make your parachute in the shape of dragon wings and strategically fire off the flamethower and you will FOOL EVERYONE.

Ed, awesome! Did you see Richard Garriott's giving a talk at 2:30 Friday at the Hilton Crystal room?

There's not a S&L meet-up scheduled yet as far as I know (*looks towards Lady Sword and Sir Laser*....)

IN-triguing... *subscribes*

With these new covers I foresee book downloads skyrocketing to the moon(s)!

Besides Lady Sword and Sir Laser, I know that I and aldenoneil are attending, and from another thread it looks like Brock, Mollie, and Jon as well.

Who else will be Conning the Dragon with us?

Haha, that's awesome! I've had a sword-and-laser shelf for awhile. We've invaded Goodreads' categorization system! *mad scientist laughter*

Wait...I can get to that individual genre page, but it doesn't show up on the 'All Genre' list for me? There's sword-and-planet and sword-and-sorcery, but no sword-and-laser:
http://www.goodreads.com/genres/list?...

Maybe there's a lag for it to show up on that list.

Jenny wrote: "I got to 23 and ran out of "favorites," but I might be back. (Can we come back?)"

Yeah, you can go back at any time and re-order your books, vote for ones that've been added, add new ones, etc.

Wroth against wroth!

The ones that are important trademarks of a character's predicament or of how they deal with certain situations, like "I am just a little girl and know nothing..." "You know nothing, Jon Snow.." -- those I don't mind. Ditto with "Where do whores go?" for representing Tyrion in post-patricide shock syndrome.

But I agree "useless as nipples on a breastplace" started to grate.

As for cyvasse, I'd just like to see an actual, real-world cyvasse board (surely in fandom somewhere that's been done ?).

Yeah, the numerical thing is hard - I started by only putting 5-star picks from my 'read' books, so it's a small and manageable number so far.

Also, I voted for one series, but mostly I'm truly voting just for individual books - for instance, I still like Game of Thrones and the first Dune the best out of their respective series, so I cast my votes for them...

Great idea - started putting my top titles in it.

I've read 45 titles on the list (as long as I use the Jenny Method(tm) of counting series even if I haven't read *all* the books in the series). 10 of those I owe to their being S&L picks!

I'm glad to see a good number of my favorites represented, but I think the initial 237 nominees list was much more intriguing and varied. Almost everything on this top 100 I've heard of before, whereas on the nominee list there were many things that made me think, 'Ooo, what's that?'

I printed out the nominee list and will slowly be feeding parts of it to my ever ravenous Goodreads to-read list.

aldenoneil wrote: "Mike wrote: "In other news, I just tracked down the first game book I ever read, back in 3rd grade or so:"

Big fan of Worlds of Power as a youth, but my God that snippet was awful. I think I should promise myself now to never go back and re-read those - I'd rather preserve the magic."

Off the video-game-book subject, but I had this kind of experience when I tried to re-read Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising. It made such a huge, magical impact on me as a kid, but I couldn't find any of that when I tried to go back to it, so I put it down to preserve some of my glowing memory of it. I keep being tempted, though, to re-read it fully...

I've mentioned it somewhere else on this forum before, but Lucky Wander Boy is a fun and funny book about one man who becomes obsessed with the video games of his youth, trying to write a "Catalogue of Obsolete Entertainments." The chapters are interspersed with snippets from that work-in-progress Catalogue, essays on actual 80's and early 90's games, but his over-the-top obsession becomes the fictional game of the book's title, an exceptionally rare and bizarre stand-up arcade game, which, through its experimental technology and surreal gameplay, almost gave him a mystical experience as a kid. He goes on a quixotic quest of sorts to track it down.

Also, the book's author, D.B. Weiss, is one of the co-writers of the HBO Game of Thrones series.

The most appropriate work with the best balance of juicy male and female roles that I can think of is.....Song of Ice and Fire!

Get on that, Tom and V! ;)

Ed wrote: "Andrew wrote: "I need to give Tad William's Otherland series another go, never got past the first book though..."

I loved the first book of the Otherland series, personally. Unfortunately, I never..."

Long ago I started both Tailchaser's Song (in high school) and the first Otherland book (right after college), liked them, but somehow got distracted and never finished them. Seeing Williams at the GRRM event has made me want to return to them.